György Spiró - Captivity

The Jews rejoiced, then, celebrating the new emperor and Passover with a gladness that outdid any past gladness as they strove to rejoice in the new emperor more spectacularly than did the Greeks, who were, of course, similarly damned overjoyed. Greeks and Jews and Copts and the members of all the other nations who dwelt in Alexandria competed with one another in joy, and even the beggars were overjoyed. How could anyone not be overjoyed, rich or poor, great or small? Life in Alexandria became one long feast, a veritable revelry, a pageant, with one celebration on top of the other, free eats and free drinks at every turn, and business booming.

The two Egyptian legions were given three hundred sesterces per head from the emperor, with the prefect distributing the funds in person in the grounds of the Gymnasium in front of the Square Stoa. The handout lasted the whole day, music thundering and dancers simpering throughout, with Flaccus calling out each soldier personally by name. The people were for the first time able to see the full strength of the two legions, an imposing spectacle as they stood there in ranks, disciplined, under the blazing sun. Everyone also rejoiced at the Circus, though voices could be heard here and there in the crowd that the plebs in Rome had been given the same, so why was it that the common people of Alexandria never got anything special? Were they all part of one empire or not? Were they any worse than the Romans? Were they — who shipped grain to Rome, after all — inferior to them somehow?

The Greeks offered no end of sacrificial animals in their shrines, feasting royally on them. The Jews of Alexandria were unable to do that, as only the Temple was entitled to make sacrificial offerings of animals, and indeed at the Temple in Jerusalem a huge animal sacrifice was dedicated to the new emperor, over and above the usual morning and evening quotas that had once been paid for in Augustus’s day (though he had later forgotten to finance this, and Tiberius had chosen not to support it any longer, it still referred to as the imperial quota). An overwhelming number of animals were sacrificed in honor of Emperor Caligula, and an accurate record was kept: more than 160,000 over the three months of public rejoicing. Uri felt dizzy on hearing that tally. He could almost see before his eyes the wretched villages of Judaea as almost any livestock that remained to them out of the tithe — the firstborn and the pick of the bunch — were herded together by the collectors with military backup and driven off to Jerusalem. There was no need for an animal that was to be sacrificed to the emperor to be ritually clean, intact, and flawless. They would have plundered the villages completely — simply because there was a new emperor, almost nowhere could there have been any meat left for feast days or the Sabbath banquets. Tears sprang to his eyes; for days he would touch no meat, in which Alexandria abounded, and only resumed eating it after he realized that his fasting was not going to assist the wretches of Judaea one bit.

Jewish masons worked from dawn to sundown to engrave hundreds of thanksgiving and laudatory plaques to go on the walls of synagogues to mark the new emperor.

Greek sculptors and painters worked from dawn to sundown carving, casting, and painting Caligulas for several thousand shrines.

The Greeks made out better, as the Jewish engravers who were lining their pockets would moan that more was paid for a statue or a picture than for a plaque, while the Greek craftsmen, if they couldn’t find buyers for all of their statues and pictures, could simply throw out whatever was left on their hands and still complain that the Jews had done better yet again.

Uri first encountered a figural representation of the new emperor, one-and-a-half times life sized, at the Serapeion. It portrayed a young, handsome, tall, lean man, with a meditatively sorrowful look on an attractive, girlish face — in fact a statue of Apollos. They also put up a statue of Caligula in the Sebasteion, with harder features, because that one had been carved as a statue of Zeus. Uri could, nevertheless, see a resemblance, from which he concluded that an authentic likeness of Caligula must have been executed, maybe more then one, and sent around the empire.

At least this is one way to see my ruler, he pondered, because there is no chance I’ll ever meet the emperor in person.

Philo composed an exquisite letter of salutation to the new emperor on behalf of all the Jews of Alexandria, polishing up a rough draft by Uri, and took it over the prefect at his palace with a request that a Jewish delegation be allowed to sail for Rome to convey the message in person. Flaccus accepted the letter with thanks, but he did not consent to the departure of a Jewish delegation. The sea, he claimed was too stormy. But he would relay the greetings to Rome with the first state express post.

The Jews did not understand why they were not allowed to send a delegation when the Greeks had already sent several.

But, Philo reported to the family, Flaccus had seemed despondent, his expression hollow-eyed; most likely he’d bee suffering many a sleepless night nowadays. There was just a hint of malicious joy in Philo’s voice, Uri was astounded to note; Tija said he had his money on Flaccus, “our Aulus,” being sacked as soon as the endless round of celebrations ceased and the emperor got around to attending to imperial business in Rome. Flaccus, Tija went on, was well aware of this, for in the final analysis he had been on friendly, even paternal, relations with Gemellus, at least as far as that was possible from a distance, and Caligula was hardly going to forgive him for that. The alabarch shook his head: Macro had made Caligula the absolute ruler, and Flaccus was one of Macro’s men so Macro would not let him be replaced. All the same, he must be suffering from sleepless nights, said Philo sardonically. Marcus held his peace, and when his father asked him for his opinion, he shuddered.

“I would not like to live in an Alexandria that had no prefect,” he said.

“Flaccus is the prefect for the time being,” the alabarch declared. “Rome never had a prefect who was cleverer, more clear-sighted, or cannier than him.”

At this Philo merely nodded, then he noted quietly, almost to himself, that Flaccus had been one of the people who had provoked Tiberius to wrath against Agrippina, Germanicus’s widow, alleging that the reason Agrippina did not eat at the emperor’s banquets was because she was fearful of being poisoned, and anyone who thought that way was capable of being a poisoner herself. That was why Tiberius had started to hate Agrippina, and in the end, of course, he had banished her and had her killed.

“But Flaccus put the centurions in Egypt on their toes,” exclaimed the alabarch.

Philo nodded.

“He has the two cohorts eating out of the palm of his hand!” the alabarch continued. “All the judges are under his thumb! He has them all under his control! He has banned Greek shrine fraternities, or placed them under his personal supervision… All within six months! For five years now there has not been one protest, not one riot, not one disturbance of public order in Alexandria! Macro is well aware of that, and he will be able to say so to Caligula if it ever comes to that.”

This information surprised Uri, but Tija corroborated it: Alexandria had not always been the tranquil, peaceable city that Uri knew.

Under earlier, weaker-handed prefects street skirmishes, armed robberies, murders, and burglaries had been the order of the day, the greater part of those crimes committed by soldiers of the cohorts, in league with robber gangs funded by wealthy Greeks, because the centurions had systematically skimmed off their weekly pay, and even the rank and file had to live off something. The very first prefect, Arius, was unable to cope with the troops, which is why he retired early to Rome under Maecenas’s protection, and that was why Augustus then sent Magius Maximus (who erected the obelisk in the Forum Augusti) back for another spell as prefect, and things remained much the same through the tenure of the prefect prior to Flaccus, the Egyptian-born Hiberus, who had died seven years ago, not entirely by chance soon after Sejanus’s fall. Throughout, soldiers had been on the loose, roaming the streets and joining the Greek gangs, all the while making use of weaponry bought by the state, the centurions even paid for the overtime they devoted to robbery, taking a cut as receivers of stolen goods. It even went so far as mercenaries selling their state-owned arms to the riffraff, simply reporting them as stolen once they got back to camp; ordinarily a soldier could normally expect to be demoted, even executed, for such a thing, but instead they were given new weapons from the stores, if they paid, so they paid, and who to but the centurions again? Army accountants hid the losses — again in exchange for a tidy payoff. The whole scam was a neat, nicely rounded system, and it’s said that many cohorts and legions in Germania or Gallia go about it in exactly the same way even today.